This blog mainly contains posts about Mozilla release engineering projects that I am working on and some personal insights.

Friday, July 11, 2014

Introducing Http authentication for Mozharness.

A while ago, I asked a colleague (you know who you are! :P) of mine how to run a specific type of test job on tbpl on my local machine and he told me with a smirk, "With mozharness!"

I wanted to punch him (HR: nothing to see here! This is not a literal punch, a figurative one), however he was right. He had good reason to say that, and I knew why he was smiling. I had to close my mouth and take it.

Here's the explanation on why he said that: most jobs running inside of tbpl are being driven by Mozharness, however they're optimized to run within the protected network of Release Engineering. This is good. This is safe. This is sound. However, when we try to reproduce a job outside of the Releng network, it becomes problematic for various reasons.

Many times we have had to guide people who are unfamiliar with mozharness as they try to run it locally with success. (Docs: How to run Mozharness as a developer). However, on other occasions when it comes to binaries stored on private web hosts, it becomes necessary to loan a machine. A loaned machine can reach those files through internal domains since it is hosted within the Releng network.